1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of graphical user interfaces, and more particularly, to a window server which is configured to support the operation of a 3D window system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A three-dimensional (3D) window system may be configured to support client applications written for a conventional 2D window system such as the X11 window system. Client applications of this sort are referred to herein as “conventional” applications. The 3D window system executes on a host computer which couples to a graphics accelerator. In response to 2D graphics API calls made by a conventional client application, the 3D window system may (a) direct the host computer to perform 2D graphical rendering and to store the pixels resulting from said rendering in virtual memory of the host computer and (b) direct the transfer of the pixels from the virtual memory to the texture memory of the graphics accelerator. This strategy of rendering to host virtual memory and then copying to texture memory is slow. Increased processing speed is very much sought after. It would also be desirable to liberate the host computer of the computational burden of having to perform the 2D rendering. The acronym API stands for “application programming interface”.
In the paper “Application Redirection: Hosting Windows Applications in 3D”, presented at the ACM Workshop on New Paradigms in Information Visualization (NPIV99), by Maarten van Dantzich et al. describe a 3D window system which uses the strategy described above.
In Technical Report no. 2003-04, entitled “3Dwm: A Platform for Research and Development of Three-Dimensional User Interfaces”, published by the Dept. of Computing Science at Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University, Niklas Elmqvist discloses a 3D window system that uses a VNC X11 Server to implement the strategy described above. VNC is acronym for Virtual Network Computing.